The definitive answer to what constitutes the ITIL community

skeptic — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:45:03 +0000

The survey was conducted via all of the Examination Institutes who sent out a questionaire asking their Training Providers to respond and also itSMFI who asked the respective Q&C committees within each country's chapters to respond.

A variety of options were put forward for each level however all responders were also free to suggest alternatives.

The itSMF UK Q&C committee responded, these results were collated and discussed by the Qualifications Board and their decision has now been published.

So the "itSMF community" is in fact the "itSMF UK Q&C committee", one Aussie (see the forum thread) and possibly a few others.

Depends on the definition...

kengon — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:40:46 +0000

Skep,

The crux of the matter here to me is the definition of "ITSM community". As you rightly note, this could be either a handful of folks at the pub OR tens of thousands of persons world-wide. In my view, I think it's the latter. I'd venture a guess that there are at least 10K in the US alone, save any foreign interests.

If we grant that this is merely a subset of itSMF members (regardless of affiliation), let's say that this represents about 4000 people. If all of the members were contacted, assuming a direct mail response rate of 2% (worst case scenario, eh?), this would represent about 80 persons. (Of course, given the topic, I'd be willing to wager that the response would be significantly higher).

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the size of the pool was probably around my 2% number... just not the 2% represented in my previous paragraph. I can hear a crap factoid brewing in the background -- 98% of the ITSM Community agree that the formal titles are representative of what the community needs (or similar). I may get lucky and have someone use this as one!

Then again, maybe this is an excellent example of representative democracy in action -- where the few represent the needs of the many. Only, we (me and the mouse in my pocket) didn't choose the few (so, it's not really representative) and those few didn't campaign for the post or reach out to the represented for their views on the issue (not very democratic, eh?).

I hate it when I blow up my own theories! ;-)

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Just how does itSMF involve the members?"

The definitive answer to what constitutes the ITIL community

Depends on the definition...